Wow, some of you are sensitive! I wasn't meaning to diss popular names at all...I just said the same names over and over again are boring, not that it's a crime or that the names are hideous or people who like them are bad namers or that there can't be some sort of meaning behind it. If you read all of that in my original post, I'm sorry; I re-read it and I don't feel like anything I said had any malice behind it.

I'm more interested in discussing what sort of tools a non-Berry would use to gauge the popularity or trendiness or likeability amongst peers of any given name. Perhaps I should have worded that more clearly.

lol. This site has so much drama is makes me laugh

Anyway, tools... baby name books. I have two, I was going to use them for character naming, but then I turned thirteen and discovered the internet. So I just... have them... I still use them sometimes, just to take a look at what I'm not looking for. I imagine that a lot of parents do this. Buy one of those 50,000 name books, read the fun lists, skim the rest, pick out ones they like and go from there.

Or what my parents did: family names. Their grandparents. Their children. Same names!

On another forum I was seeing a lot of 'combine mine and my husbands name to make a baby!' But haven't seen any of that here?

To gauge popularity, how many do they know of? What names have their friends used? Ask around. Hey, you said your cousin had a baby last year, what name did she use?

Growing up I read Beyond Madison and Montana from cover to cover along with a few other naming books. You can get name books from the library and I think a lot of people just pull names from names they've heard while out or people they've met.

I do know that I'm a bit "name overkill" compared to my friends. And most of my friends tend to use the same names too - I know 8 newborn boys who was named Liam over the past 6 months and 5 girls named Caroline. I do tend to find it boring when people chose the same names over and over again, but then most of my friends find my name taste too adventurous (I can guarantee, if I didn't have a partner who keeps me "grounded" my boys would probably have more adventurous names.)